So much undifferentiated schtuff here, people's dreams mixing with delusions, the difference between mathematicians and scientists, the fear of the Other, and of course Ray Kurzweil the leader of the modern day Ponce de Leons searching for the fountain of the youth.
It's really difficult to be able to speak about it in any rational manner because of the mess. As an aside, I want to point out that Ray Kurzweil is not a scientist, he is a science fiction author, a futurist, and an engineer, but not a scientist.
Completely stolen from Kurzweil's biography page:
"Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius†by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine†by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,†and PBS selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,†along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions.
Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.
Kurzweil is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
He has received 20 honorary doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has authored 7 books, 5 of which have been national bestsellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in science.
Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity Is Near, was a New York Times bestseller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His latest New York Times bestseller is How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.
His website, KurzweilAI.net, tracks daily breakthroughs in science and technology and has over three million new readers annually.
In 2012, Ray Kurzweil was appointed a Director of Engineering at Google, heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding."
The first and main question here is the question as to whether consciousness and everything involved in it can be emulated algorithmically. The speaker in this tried tried to definitively dismiss the possibility by showing Godel's theorem by showing that any formal system (algorithm, machine, computer program) can never completely represent the truth of reality, especially concerning itself. But this really only matters if you think that consciousness is a complete representation of truth, or that the representation of conscious requires that sort of complete truth, which this man setup as a point of reasoning that is unproven, and seems unlikely to me.
The real questions, the benefits and the real dangers of effective AI are unknown right now, and it's very important to be careful in AI research, but at the moment the perceived thought leaders in the subject are a lot of hysterical people predicting worse case and best case fairy tale scenarios.
You're not really looking at this from a very deep perspective. And Frenkel's own negative experiences in the Soviet Union, with its communist form of government based ENTIRELY out of the idea that people are just cells in a larger "organic" body known as "the state," is the root conceptual problem with the old-style 17th-century scientific thinking that still plagues humanity today. Yes I know that the Soviet Union was not entirely based on materialism because organicism is not materialism, it has its origin in Russian mysticism. But they do play together well in theory. Frenkel had at the time of his being flunked out completely dissociated himself from the experience of who he was at that time, just as science, while relegating religion to intellectual obscurity in the 17th century, had disassociated itself from the innately religious part of man. But this religious part has revived itself in science in the form of dogma. It is not religious in the literal sense, it is just a new form of dogmatic enslavement, a new system, a new Matrix. Frenkel needed to (in an "inner child" psychology sense) reconnect with that wounded 16-year-old who didn't even know he was wounded at the time of his castigation as a Jew by the Soviet university system. Western civilization needs to reconnect with that "child" left behind in the 17th century (and it was left behind for good reason, as there can be no progress or enlightenment where religion rules completely over the scientific mind). Nevertheless, Frenkel does not want to leave scientific advancements behind. Frenkel is calling for a synthesis of mind and matter, a dualism which exists formally for theology and informally for science.
Now we're at the root of the problem, the
conceptual problem, that Frenkel brought up at the beginning of the video. Formal truth cannot be established mathematically, it relies on assumptions that cannot be proven. But this is not a weakness, it is a strength. Science, on the other hand, informally assumes that
all of its meta-scientific assumptions are established truths, although not a single one of them can be proven. And it has some good, albeit superficial, reason to believe so, considering the material advancements science has made. But these reasons, as Frenkel points out somewhere in the video, amount to nothing more than rationalizations.
Science needs to get on the ball and recognize the fact that its informally religious dogma is in desperate need of reformation, just as the church needed reformation. Perhaps Frenkel's fears about AI are entirely based out of preposterous predictions about uploading one's mind to a robot computer. However, it goes far beyond that. It goes to the past three hundred years of using science to create weapons capable of destroying great masses of humanity, of a loss of inner faith, of the idea that it's better to look outside of ourselves to the material world of mere sensations, rather than inside where wholeness and completion are found.
You can see this in today's political sphere, in which Socialists are clamoring to greatly expand the system of hand-outs based on materialistic class-hatred rationalizations regarding the rich vs. the poor, forging hatred out of anger against greed in an attempt to blame all of our problems on things outside of ourselves.
"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."
